The Emasculating Truth
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/emasculating-truth/
Global consciousness is really buzzing right now. It is stimulated by the internet like an individual in the midst of an enormous thought. This documentary is an indication of what i have just said. It is a remise en question of the nature of masculinity. Human consciousness is waking up. There is no doubt about that. Nietzsche, Socrates, Einstein would have been proud to see how we are now beginning to question ourselves.
he Marketing of Madness
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/marketing-of-madness-are-we-all-insane/
The Problem with this doc is that it is leaning too heavily against psychiatry. It make the argument that psychiatry as a knowledge field is compromised by a conflict of interest due to the fact that it is too closely allied with Big Pharmaceuticals. If the arguments they make are true, then i am really quite disgusted with the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, from the producers to the legislators to the prescribers and so forth. If it is true that psychiatrists responsible for the definition of mental disorders in the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) are on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies, as has historically been shown to be the case in this documentary, then i do not see how i can have any faith either in psychiatry of pharmacology.
Where the documentary goes too far is in suggesting that there is no reasonable basis for the existence of mental disorders. Though there is relatively little hard scientific evidence for the biological basis of mental disorders, it can not be said that there is little intersubjective validity to the claims that there are certain "observable" mental disorders which bare common features. The intersubjective validity stems from people complaining about being unhappy on one end and psychiatrists compiling lists of symptoms which correspond to those various forms of unhappiness. It takes two to come up with the definition of a mental ailment: a psychiatrist and a patient. Of course social and moral themes in the narrative of the time also contribute to the creation and definition of mental illness. So while there is little hard science to attest to the existence of mental illness, the current definitions of mental illness still hold some value because they do encapsulate the anecdotal evidence brought in by hundreds of millions of patient- individuals.
This documentary is suggesting that the pill is made first in a laboratory and that the mental illness is defined afterwards. It's pretty scary to look at things that way, but given that money rules the world, i have to admit that i'm intrigued by the suggestion. Where the documentary gets even more scary for me is in suggesting that pharmaceutical companies, through the intermediary of psychiatry intend to go into the prevention business. They could actually corner that mental health market as well. When I in fact, happen to know that prevention has more to do with how we live our lives than with what pills we are taking. If pharma wants to prescribe something for a condition we already have then i am willing to discuss it. If pharma wants to sell us something to prevent us from feeling, realizing, experiencing, knowing, sensing, intuiting, thinking an unpleasant emotion then I say: "do not move one step further! Step back! You are moving into the territory of the soul and you are forbidden from going there. The soul is where depression has meaning and anxiety is but an awakening to reality. The soul is where science can not easily go. It is the home of the master, the origin of the scientific mind. But science will go there. It will go everywhere eventually. It will leave nothing unexamined. So fine, science can and perhaps should examine the nature of the soul, as it currently does through an examination of consciousness in MRI's. But business is barred from that realm. Ah, what am i talking about? Illicit drugs are in the top 10 items in terms of economic weight. Business is already altering normal consciousness. Advertising is manipulating it too. Anyway, what disturbs me is that pills will be prescribed to keep us from getting depressed or anxious or from ever having intermittent explosive anger disorder. Maybe those things tell us something about who we are collectively and individually. Though it is every patient must walk into a clinic and complain about unhappiness to get drug so I guess, only the people who really need them are getting them. Still, it seems like an awful lot more of us are asking for them. As we progress, the definitions of mental illness in the DSM move with us. I guess there is no helping that. Maybe progress is killing us.
The documentary makes the a good if true argument that the definitions of mental disorders are actually arrived at through an intersubjective method. In other words, the definitions are voted on by top level psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association. Voting is not typically science but it is an good intersubjective method in my view.
In conclusion, this documentary seems slightly biased in favour of an all or nothing, anti-psychiatry view. The more balanced view is to suggest that psychiatry may in fact be compromised as a knowledge field due to conflicts of interest in its relationship to big pharma, yet there is still much valid and useful information within the knowledge field of psychiatry. It's methods of classification of mental illnesses, even though somewhat lacking in hard scientific basis are based on an analysis of a huge amount of observational data.

Neuroscience vs. the Believing Brain.

In this one, neuroscience reiterates the position that there is nothing in the mind but brains. Nothing in a human skull but neural networks, chain reactions, meaningless bits of activity. The speaker then goes on to suggest that science can take a quantitative approach to moral and political issues with some success. I am torn about the speaker's views to tell you the truth. One one hand, i believe that belief is killing us in the form of cultural and religions and political wars. I recognize that one world with one culture and one science might be the answer to all that. On the other hand, i think that science must accept it's limitations and proceed carefully when making claims about the ability of the quantitative method to find solutions to political and moral problems. I also believe that culture is important and that the recognition of each human being's individuality is fundamental to defining us as human beings. Clearly there are thoughts and there are feelings and these two are fundamentally different experiences of the world. So far, i am stuck on the somewhat simplistic conclusion that science has does not make use of all the wonderful data that subjective feelings bring to human understanding and can therefore never yield any discovery which is fully representative of human experience. Thus at it's best, science can only say a few things about one half of what it means to be human. For the the other half, you still need art.

This one is a great Jungian perspective on the origins of the archetypal figure known as batman. After seeing this, you can really understand how it is that a figure like batman became so huge. He speaks to our unconscious. He asks the big questions. He fights for the people like Luke Skywalker. From an art therapy perspective, he transforms a trauma into an asset.

John Lennon, as i come to realize in my later thirties is one of my idols. He came from nothing, got everything and advocated a return to nothing which was in fact everything. He continued to live out his rebellious life even though he was paid to be quiet. He chose to follow his heart, knowing full well it was at personal risk to himself. He advocated love at a time of violence. He thought and behaved like a child. He feared for his safety and openly felt people were watching him and wished him ill. He wrote a couple of songs about his impression that the c.i.a were following him. He transliterated everything he seemed to be thinking and feeling into song. He turned his guitar into a canon and blew criminal minds to pieces without shedding a drop of blood. He was a Beatle. But being a Beatle was the least of his accomplishments. It was a condition of circumstances which all led to the Beatles coming together and being an irrevokable hit. It is about everything he did afterwards which made him great. He was eloquent when he spoke and used the least amount of words possible to express the greatest ideas. Like a true musician, he condensed a ton of information into a couple of notes. He would have loved the internet. He would have despised Hollywood. Actually he already detested Hollywood in the 60's shortly after he was punished for suggesting the Beatles were more popular than god. He lived his life as one long and serious performance peace. His existence is possibly the greatest work of Shock Art in human history. He beat and bludgeoned American consciousness to a pulp at a time when Freud's nephew was concocting plans to make us slaves to advertising. Freud's nephew was using Freud's ideas to develop the professional field of public relations. Actually Eddy Bernaise coined the term: "public relations" and devised schemes - based on Freuds theories - for marketing cigarettes to women and turning us all into slaves to consumerism. Bernaise said we have to replace needs with desires. What a comparison to put Bernaise next to Lennon but to show you the greatness of human flight, i must show you the depths of human stupidity. I of course situate myself somewhere in between.

Ok, this is my new favourite. It is a doc about the ability to make people believe in faith healing. This documentary releases for the first time ever, a scientific examination of the world of faith healing. It shows how vulnerable and predisposed people can be led down a path of betrayal into handing over their money and their very free will to charlatans. At the end, the actor reveals to the believers that they have been fooled. I have never seen anything like this.

The sexualization of childhood. Push up bras, lingerie for children? It is here, now. You made it world. We bought it. As a note, i have to say that most of the documentaries which i have seen about the nature of social sexualization have had really strong feminist bias. This means the documentaries are narrated by women who seem to believe that men are responsible for the ills which women are facing with regards to sexual identity. I think the issues around sexualization are a little more complicated than mere feminist bias can uncover.

Also look at the documentary below for an example of feminist bias in the examination of labiaplasty for women. The narrator of the documentary wishes to present the issue that women's reason for labiaplasty is men's judgement. It is not so simple. Women's motivations for undergoing such operations do include men's judgements but not exclusively. They are also motivated by a will to power and a desire for control over others. Hence, the very things which feminism seek to negate in gender relations.

Suburbia. Holy crap, this doc makes it look like a living hell. It shows suburbia as a place that kills culture, humanity, starves creativity and makes you fat. Hmmmm. Maybe i'll hold off on that cheap suburban dream a little while longer. Plus it is ugly out there. The space you walk on belongs to private interests. There are no small businesses die, in favour of big ones. No community. People forget how to interact with each other. Ah, forget it.

The Problem with this doc is that it is leaning too heavily against psychiatry. It make the argument that psychiatry as a knowledge field is compromised by a conflict of interest due to the fact that it is too closely allied with Big Pharmaceuticals. If the arguments they make are true, then i am really quite disgusted with the pharmaceutical industry as a whole, from the producers to the legislators to the prescribers and so forth. If it is true that psychiatrists responsible for the definition of mental disorders in the DSM (diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders) are on the payroll of pharmaceutical companies, as has historically been shown to be the case in this documentary, then i do not see how i can have any faith either in psychiatry of pharmacology.

Where the documentary goes too far is in suggesting that there is no reasonable basis for the existence of mental disorders. Though there is relatively little hard scientific evidence for the biological basis of mental disorders, it can not be said that there is little intersubjective validity to the claims that there are certain "observable" mental disorders which bare common features. The intersubjective validity stems from people complaining about being unhappy on one end and psychiatrists compiling lists of symptoms which correspond to those various forms of unhappiness. It takes two to come up with the definition of a mental ailment: a psychiatrist and a patient. Of course social and moral themes in the narrative of the time also contribute to the creation and definition of mental illness. So while there is little hard science to attest to the existence of mental illness, the current definitions of mental illness still hold some value because they do encapsulate the anecdotal evidence brought in by hundreds of millions of patient- individuals.

This documentary is suggesting that the pill is made first in a laboratory and that the mental illness is defined afterwards. It's pretty scary to look at things that way, but given that money rules the world, i have to admit that i'm intrigued by the suggestion. Where the documentary gets even more scary for me is in suggesting that pharmaceutical companies, through the intermediary of psychiatry intend to go into the prevention business. They could actually corner that mental health market as well. When I in fact, happen to know that prevention has more to do with how we live our lives than with what pills we are taking. If pharma wants to prescribe something for a condition we already have then i am willing to discuss it. If pharma wants to sell us something to prevent us from feeling, realizing, experiencing, knowing, sensing, intuiting, thinking an unpleasant emotion then I say: "do not move one step further! Step back! You are moving into the territory of the soul and you are forbidden from going there. The soul is where depression has meaning and anxiety is but an awakening to reality. The soul is where science can not easily go. It is the home of the master, the origin of the scientific mind. But science will go there. It will go everywhere eventually. It will leave nothing unexamined. So fine, science can and perhaps should examine the nature of the soul, as it currently does through an examination of consciousness in MRI's. But business is barred from that realm. Ah, what am i talking about? Illicit drugs are in the top 10 items in terms of economic weight. Business is already altering normal consciousness. Advertising is manipulating it too. Anyway, what disturbs me is that pills will be prescribed to keep us from getting depressed or anxious or from ever having intermittent explosive anger disorder. Maybe those things tell us something about who we are collectively and individually. Though it is every patient must walk into a clinic and complain about unhappiness to get drug so I guess, only the people who really need them are getting them. Still, it seems like an awful lot more of us are asking for them. As we progress, the definitions of mental illness in the DSM move with us. I guess there is no helping that. Maybe progress is killing us.

The documentary makes the a good if true argument that the definitions of mental disorders are actually arrived at through an intersubjective method. In other words, the definitions are voted on by top level psychiatrists within the American Psychiatric Association. Voting is not typically science but it is an good intersubjective method in my view.

In conclusion, this documentary seems slightly biased in favour of an all or nothing, anti-psychiatry view. The more balanced view is to suggest that psychiatry may in fact be compromised as a knowledge field due to conflicts of interest in its relationship to big pharma, yet there is still much valid and useful information within the knowledge field of psychiatry. It's methods of classification of mental illnesses, even though somewhat arbitrary and non-scientific are based on an analysis of a huge amount of data.

In the architects of control by Micheal Tsarion, the notion is put forth that mind control exists. In the first part of this youtube accessible doc, we are given a not so subtle glimpse of Tsarion's view that Government and other powerful individuals control the masses through highly subtle, subliminal forces. At first, my intention was to stop watching because i thought i was being taken down the path of another conspiracy theory. but I decided to continue watching because interspersed with what could be labeled as paranoia, I was taken in by some of his ideas, which echoed some of my own. Ultimately, I am very happy to have continued on Tsarion's trip because the exposé eventually comes around full circle when the narrator explains himself by talking about what he has said. He goes on to say that he is not pointing the finger at anyone but that his aim is to empower people through the process of disturbing them into awareness. He does not stop there though. He goes on to add that he has a genuine interest in helping with solutions an not just dismantling the system. In sum, i think he shows humility in his approach and intention where many others would have developed god complexes. As he rightly points out, most of the guru's of the 60's now live in mansions far and away from any place where they might be of help to us lowly creatures.

My dad thought, after seeing the first 10 minutes of the documentary that the author was mostly paranoid, making huge sweeping statements with little evidence in support. But this is not a court of law. The documentary is a social investigation of what makes people think, do, say, make, what they do. When we are asking Why type questions, there is usually little evidence to be found and what evidence can be found is highly subjective, anecdotal and hugely philosophical in nature. When one is asking "How" type questions, one can often find scientific support. You just connect the dots to find out for example how electricity works or what constitutes an atom or how babies are made etc. The why questions take courage to ask, and even more courage to begin to answer.

Remember, the basic premise of Tsarion's work is to demonstrate that mind control exists. Of course it exists. Mothers mind control their children so they don't cross the street on red lights. Fathers, well, we are all aware of what the holy Father represents in terms of mind control. Those priests and bishops, all referred to as "father" what kind of control did they have on our minds? Tsarion makes the point well that religion is a form of mind control and that if you can convince a child that when he dies he will go to the afterlife, be surrounded by beautiful women and all he desires, then you can probably make him kill people to get there. You can probably make Christians and Muslims go to war if you can just get to the mind of the child before it is strong and independent enough to think it's own thoughts.

I have no problem believing that mind control exists. Proving it is somewhat of another matter. Suggesting who is doing it, is easy enough but again, proving it is no slice. Proof killed religion but it can not kill god. Only god can do that. Eventually, as you get closer to the 16th and final part of this nearly 2 hour documentary, the narrator and an assistant director talk about how and why they made the movie. They also give you some tips for how to read it.

It does take a discerning mind to sift through what may be paranoia and misplaced judgement on the part of the film maker in order to find the golden nuggets in this film. However, I think the trek through to the end is worth it. By the time the show is over, I was left feeling that the narrator knows something important about the function of art and image in our society, that he is versed in the ways of power and the intentions of the primates that we are. Sure, he is trying to sell us something but as he fairly points out, everyone is trying to sell you something, the question is: "what are you buying?"